Print Museum

Born in Norfolk in 1971, Heidi Williamson has lived in central Scotland, Brussels and Salisbury. She now lives in Wymondham, Norfolk. She is an Advisory Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund, and was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of East Anglia from 2018 to 2020. From 2011 to 2014, she was writer-in-residence at the John Jarrold Printing Museum in Norwich and in 2008-09 was poet-in-residence at the London Science Museum’s Dana Centre. In 2008 she received an Arts Council award to complete her first collection, Electric Shadow (Bloodaxe Books, 2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, which was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry Prize. The Print Museum (Bloodaxe Books, 2016) won the Poetry Category and the Book by the Cover award in the 2016 East Anglian Book Awards. Her third collection, Return by Minor Road, is published by Bloodaxe Books in June 2020. A poem from this collection,‘With a rootless lily held in front of him’, won the 2019 Plough International Poetry Prize. Her work has been used to inspire poetry and science discussions in schools and adult creative writing groups, and has featured in NHS waiting rooms, cafés, and at festivals. Poems have been translated into Polish, Turkish, Romanian and German. She works with poets worldwide by Skype as a poetry surgeon for The Poetry Society, teaches for The Poetry School, and mentors poets through The Writing Coach, National Centre for Writing and The Poetry School.

'Heidi Williamson's poems are about contact with the haunted world. She understands uncertainty and loss, as well as the trace loss leaves behind as memory, memory that acts like a Blitz incendiary waiting to ignite later in life. The sensuousness of language is asserted...through tender explorations of our haunted fabric.' - George Szirtes; 'Williamson knows that poetry is a means of investigation, rigorous and disciplined; her poems often begin with a thought that a lesser poet would be content to end with. This approach is evident in the beautiful precision of her language, the way form itself becomes a means of discovery.' - Esther Morgan; 'I am a great admirer of Heidi's poetry and find her fascination with science very exciting. There isn't enough high quality poetry that is empathetic to science around and the value of her approach extends well beyond poetry.' - Professor Anne Osbourn of The Osbourn Lab, John Innes Centre (international research centre for plant science and microbiology)